


Intent is Everything

by yuletide_archivist



Category: X-Men (Comicverse)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2003-12-20
Updated: 2003-12-20
Packaged: 2018-01-25 03:18:10
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,252
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1628732
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/yuletide_archivist/pseuds/yuletide_archivist
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>Written for Helena Larkin</p>
    </blockquote>





	Intent is Everything

**Author's Note:**

> Written for Helena Larkin

 

 

She was gone. 

It could have happened at any time, really; a thousand times before this one, a hundred different opportunities for it all to come crashing down. Saving the world three times before breakfast forced you to deal with the possibilities of your loved ones dying, every time you put down one more evil mutant or had one more narrow escape. 

There hadn't been any escape for Jean this time. Scott thought they'd been lucky enough the last time they tangled with Magneto, but this time.... 

He cut off the thought there, took a deep breath, stood up. His breath hung cold in the air; Bobby was practicing ice-slides, Amara diligently melting them one by one as he finished. They were good students, both of them; quick and lively and bursting with potential. Eager to see action. 

"That's enough for now," Scott said brusquely. "Clean up here and go study the chapter in your handouts on cognitive instinct for tomorrow." 

Bobby ground to a stop, the squeak and scrunch of his ice slide jarring through Scott's teeth. It took a healthy dose of self-control for him to just turn and walk into the mansion instead of _shrakt_ ing the slide to pieces, watching it fly in jagged shards from the force of his optic beams. The kids spoke in low tones as he walked, and he picked up his pace. He didn't want to hear the pity in their voices. 

... 

"You must give yourself time to feel the loss of her," Ororo said. "Allow yourself to grieve, Scott." 

"Jean knew the risks she was taking," the Professor said. "She went into this fully aware. We must honour her sacrifice, Scott, or we dishonour her memory." 

Logan didn't say anything to him. Logan was barely even there. 

... 

The Danger Room was a godsend, in those days. Scott spent hours in there, running program after program, simulations designed to test his nerve and hone his abilities. He commanded packs of hologrammatic X-Men, defeated legions of hallucinatory foes. He worked until his shoulders were so tight and knotted that he could barely raise his arms to take his uniform off. 

It felt good. Or at least -- it felt better than how he felt most of the time. 

He wasn't stupid about it, of course, because even in grief he couldn't bring himself to be willfully destructive and there would be no point in working himself to the extent of hospitalization-requiring exhaustion. An emergency could crop up at any moment, and he couldn't fail the team. He couldn't fail any of them ever again, now that he'd failed the most important one. 

It was two and a half weeks before Logan came back, and when he did he looked battered even for Wolverine. There was something in his eyes, a flat and angry pain, a look that had grown into him and was no sudden stranger. Logan was accustomed to losing people, Scott was sure. Probably as accustomed as Scott himself was. 

It was another four days before Logan dropped in on one of Scott's Danger Room sessions. He was running a protocol on shape-shifters, a simulated busy downtown sidewalk and one shape-shifter in among the bunch. Logan paused the program for the briefest of seconds before appearing at Scott's side, smelling of cigar smoke and leather and beer, prickling Scott's nose. 

"It's a good thing you can smell 'em," Logan mentioned. Scott ran his ring finger over the tap-button in his glove, reached up to fine-tune the ruby quartz visor. 

"It's a hologram image. There's no smell." He caught sight of a flicker at the tail end of a woman's sundress, started moving towards her, edging firmly through the crowd. Logan followed and even through his concentration, Scott couldn't help but admire the guy's stealth; he prowled through the people like they were fog, mist. 

He caught up with the sundress, skirted quickly around her, ended up standing in front of her. He could see Logan coming up behind, Logan's curious look and resulting amusement when the woman morphed again and again (now blonde now white-headed now bald), Logan's flat hard stare when the shape-shifter's hair turned red, red, familiar red. Logan's barely-there frown when Scott blasted the woman right in her Jean Grey-lookalike face. 

"That's some therapy, Slim," he grunted. Scott's mouth tightened, imperceptibly. 

"It's training," he said crisply. "If I want therapy --" 

"-- you know where to avoid it." Logan bared his teeth. "Gotcha." 

The lapel of a wool suit jacked flickered, and Scott turned away from him. 

... 

It was a day and a half before Scott snapped. 

The thing was that Logan wouldn't stop following him. Wherever Scott went in the mansion, Logan would be there, leaning against the walls or walking slowly by or the worst -- already there, lurking. It was beginning to drive Scott to distraction, and when we went out to tune up his bike in the thoughts of perhaps going for a ride around Westchester and found Logan casually poking around it, that was the absolute last. 

Logan's instincts were uncanny; they were heightened and primal and his instincts were unerring. But Scott had trained for years, against physical and mental attackers, and he was able to leap across the bike and use the forward momentum of his body to slam Logan against the wall before Logan reacted fully. 

"That," Scott panted through clenched teeth, hands pressed against Logan's shoulders, "is _my_ bike." 

Logan rolled his head, his neck making painful snapping sounds. His teeth glinted in the dim light as he said, "Takes that to make you let it out, huh? I'd'a known that, I'd'a trashed it way before now." 

"Logan," Scott said evenly, "I don't need this." He tilted his chin so it scraped across the broad side of the claw Logan had out, pressed against his throat. "I don't need you to give me some sort of...of _outlet_ for what I'm feeling. You have no idea what I'm going through." 

"You need to get over it." 

"What I need...is for you to mind your own damn business." Scott reached up and put his hand over the topside of the claw, and he saw the cruel set of Logan's eyes and braced himself for when the claw retracted, adamantium so keen and the movement so fast that he felt a thin line of blood against his palm where it ran. Scott grabbed Logan's arm at the elbow and pressed the pad of his thumb against the cut there, the clean red slit over Logans' middle knuckles where the claw had slid back in. It was damp and hot, hot like fever and rage, and he could almost feel the flesh knitting back together around his thumb, an obstruction to the healing. 

Logan closed his eyes and tipped his head back. "Summers," he growled, velvet dragged to shreds over gravel, "you'll want to move your hands right fucking quick." 

His hands tightened at that and he pulled himself in closer, until his nose was prickling again and Logan's slitted eyes were glittering like his teeth. "You're in my space, Logan," Scott snarled. "You're standing right in my space." 

Those teeth lengthened, whiter and deadlier in the half-light. Logan pushed his body away from the wall and hard against him, and Scott felt the knuckle-wound heal completely, sealing his thumb out. He turned it up, dazed with the smell of leather and smoke, and the pad gleamed dark red before Logan raised it to his mouth. 

 


End file.
